Your A4-Size Business Companion: Choosing the Best Compact Notebook. Part I. Page 23

Today we would like to offer you the first article in the series devoted to the compact notebook solutions from the leading laptop designers and manufacturers. The models from Acer, Dialogue Technology, Fujitsu Siemens, IBM, LG, MSI, and Samsung boast unique personality, excellent features, small size and weight. Hope this series of articles helps you make the best choice!

MSI MegaBook S270

MSI doesn’t offer a very long model range of notebooks, but the company tries to experiment even without having established its brand on that market in the same measure as the leading brands – the MSI S270 is one of the first notebooks with AMD’s Turion64 processor.

You can but seldom see a row of stickers like that one on a modern notebook:

Users have already got more or less used to ATI’s chipsets, but mobile processors from AMD are still regarded as exotic products and are usually shunned by people who turn towards the heavily advertised Centrino and Sonoma platforms from Intel instead. A mass user may not even know about notebooks on processors other than Intel’s and, frankly speaking, AMD’s earlier mobile CPU models were far from perfect. High heat dissipation and mediocre performance were typical of the rare notebooks with AMD inside that were available on the market. Of course, they didn’t sell well.

You may have probably seen tests of AMD’s new mobile processors on the Internet. They seem to be good enough products as to justify MSI’s policy. The company can’t get a big slice of the market pie by selling Sonoma or Centrino notebooks, so it offers an unusual product with unique characteristics. The performance and the battery life of the resulting sub-notebook will be discussed later on. Right now let’s check other properties of this computer.

The battery’s parameters are typical enough and it is placed in S260/S270 series sub-notebooks (the S260 is a modification in the same case, but based around the more traditional Pentium M processor) just like it is in some other of the tested notebooks:

That is, the battery protrudes from the notebook’s rear and does double duty as a stand to lift the rear part of the case up. This solution may make sense from an engineer’s point of view, but it makes the device thicker:

A second “half-size” battery should come with the notebook, but the resellers told me that strange things had happened with the shipment package. Some notebooks of that series come with two batteries, others with a “half” battery, and others still with a normal battery, like the tested sample. MSI seems not yet settled on what battery is the most optimal. You can also buy a second battery optionally, by the way.